> When 1200 people compete for 1 open internship position, can I really afford to waste my time like this?
If you think of education as trying to lead people into being whole humans, seems like literature and philosophy (properly taught) are some of most critical subjects.
I want this to be true, my arts degree says I even put my money where my mouth is, but university has largely become viewed as vocational training. You do it not to become whole, you do it to become employable.
I'll do that when I can be confident in my ability to afford food. Being a "whole human" just isn't a priority when you might literally become homeless
This feeling will never go away because it’s not caused by circumstances, it’s caused by anxiety.
You’re a student ostensibly studying computer science at University. Taking a few hours a week to stop a smell the roses has zero chance of being the thing that pushes you into homelessness.
When you start working the anxiety won’t go away. You’ll always have the next thing to worry about. What if I lose this job—I only have 6 months of savings. Then you get married and it becomes—if I lose my job my spouse will divorce me. You have a kid and it becomes “Sorry honey I have to work late. Dinner
with the family isn’t a priority when the kids could literally become homeless if I lose my job and we can’t afford good schools.”
You can’t fix the anxiety by accomplishing the next goal. It’s never going to be enough. You have to learn to live with some uncertainty or you’ll end up miserable.
Also from a more practical perspective, there are advantages to being a more well rounded person. The best programmer is rarely the highest paid. Soft skills are at least as important. Being a well rounded human is a big part of those soft skills.
I’m not saying you necessarily need to be well versed in literary fiction. But having a wide breadth of knowledge comes in handy.
Sadly this is true. I make about $200k/yr gross, have a working software engineer for a wife, and have enough in retirement that I could “coast” on contributions for the next 30 years and be fine in retirement. I still can’t be rid of the financial anxiety I started with. My childhood involved a homeless shelter, my college years included struggling to make rent and buy food, and those experiences forever colored how I see and treat money.
>You can’t fix the anxiety by accomplishing the next goal. It’s never going to be enough. You have to learn to live with some uncertainty or you’ll end up miserable.
There is definitely a difference in quality of life due to less worrying once you or your network have sufficient assets and passive income such that short term volatility does not mean you or your kids go hungry/shelter-less.
First saw the C compiler sources on Geoff Steckel (local guru)'s desk around 1973 at the Harvard graduate computing center, and was absolutely floored at this fascinating-looking language. (Harvard got the first Unix tapes outside of Bell Labs; not sure of the connection there.)
All upper-case, of course, as the DEC lineprinters didn't have lower case yet. Real upper case was struck-through upper.
That March 1977 map always brings back a flood of memories to this old-timer.
Happy nights spent hacking in the Harvard graduate computer center next to the PDP-1/PDP-10 (Harv-1, Harv-10), getting calls on the IMP phone in the middle of the night from the BBN network operations asking me to reboot it manually as it had gotten wedged...
And, next to me, Bill Gates writing his first assembler/linker/simulator for the Altair 8080... (I tried talking him out of this microcomputer distraction -- we have the whole world of mainframes at our fingertips! -- without success.)
(Edit:) We also would play the game of telnet-till-you-die, going from machine to machine around the world (no passwords on guest accounts in the early days), until the connection died somewhere along the way.
Plus, once the hackers came along, Geoff Steckel (systems guy on the PDP-10) wrote a little logger to record all incoming guests keystrokes on an old teletype, so we could watch them attempting to hack the system.
On the subject of that last item, it is to my amusement that modern internet scanners are completely confused by a 1970s operating system. They record a "hit" when they find an open telnet port, but then get stuck because there is no recognizable prompt after the system banner message prints. They find a running FTP server but get confused that it does not use recognizable filesystem semantics. They get even more confused when it ignores passwords because the system has none. By all rules and tenets of security doctrine this system should be the internet equivalent to a smoking crater, instantly and utterly destroyed by advanced security threats beyond the imaginations of its creators.
PS: It is also amusing that an unmodified 1970s SMTP server can still deliver messages to gmail and receive responses back, given only the provision of a SPF record. Sadly, the coming mandatory requirement for DKIM will finally make this no longer a possibility.
PPS: It is much less amusing to attempt to read the gmail user's responses on a terminal.
"Plain text mode", hiding in the "kebab menu" (i.e. the three vertically stacked dots) on the bottom of the message composition window. It even seems to stay on as a default once activated!
Very useful for the few times I actually need to send email to mailing lists with strong opinions about newfangled MIME multipart messages :)
I did manage to avoid being Microsoft employee #12 or so (my buddy Bob Greenberg was #8, I think?, and encouraged me to come join them), and Adobe employee #8 (I knew Chuck Geschke from some earlier work done as an undergrad extending his PhD thesis to Harvard's extensible language ECL), due to various life circumstances. I guess God didn't want be to be a spoiled rotten billionaire.
Another near miss was co-consulting with Len Bosack at HP setting up Lisp Machine networking, and wondering how the heck the then-nascent Cisco was ever going to sell more than a few hundred routers (based on the same Sun-1 boards developed by Andy Bechtolstein at Standford that we used at Imagen, the first typeset-quality laser printers, a spinoff from Don Knuth's research at Stanford) to universities and government labs.
As Gates said, those of us who grew up with the ARPAnet and came to take it as a simple fact of life like electricity didn't see the Internet juggernaut coming.
> As Gates said, those of us who grew up with the ARPAnet and came to take it as a simple fact of life like electricity didn't see the Internet juggernaut coming.
Well, I wasn't even close to the technology nexus that you describe, neither in time nor in place, but this really resonates with me.
I RELIABLY manage to "not get" stuff in my own bubble, not because I'm too far away from it or because I don't understand it, but the exact opposite.
For example, I clearly remember how in the early 2000s I thought/felt "well, of course Amazon/eBay/Google is a great business, but everyone is already using them anyway, so what's the upside" and similiar other Thoughts Of Great Wisdom And Foresight.
You worked at Imagen? I had to write a partial Impress emulator a little while ago so I could make waste paper from my lispm. It only supported the image format since that was the only thing the lispm sent when printing the screen, but it beat the heck out of taking photos of a CRT.
Yes, helped start it (first or second employee back in 1980(?)).
Wild! I had forgotten the LispMs had Impress support; I think that came out of the time when we worked with Janet Walker, head of documentation at Symbolics.
The problem is that if you want to provide a full-featured file picker, and not rely on Google's limited browser-based version, your app will require the full "drive" scope. (We do, and we do, for our InDesign-to-Google Docs connector plugin.)
If you use some of the lower-tier CASA labs, it's not that expensive (4K/year), but it is definitely a nuisance for a pure desktop plugin like ours that has absolutely no cloud component (other than connecting to GDocs).
There's nothing quite like the "flow" you get into when you're a fast, accurate typist and the code just pours of you like honey. (Well, that sounds slow. ;-)
Especially when using a fantastic mechanical (Hall effect) keyboard like (still) my favorite Apex Pro from SteelSeries.
Nothing matches or probably ever will match the old MIT AI Lab Tom Knight Hall effect keyboards (Microswitch), but these are mighty close. Something about the heft and the smoothness of those keys has never been replicated. I can still remember that feel quite distinctly 45 years later...
C'mon, that's such a cheap take. The Fed has done nothing but destroy the value of the dollar since its founding in 1913.